Once (16 page)

I was on the overspill. It's not a very wide structure, you must understand, not like a big dam. Twenty feet wide at most, I'd say. There'd been enough rain that year for the lake to spill through spring and early summer, but now it merely brimmed and rarely did a wave lap a foot onto the spill. I stood and cast out into the bay. How many times had I cast my line that day? How many times since that first day of days? How far had I grown into this place that now it did not matter if I did or didn't catch a fish? I'd lost heart to find faith. But then at the very full extent of my range, immediately a fish took my fly. It was so alien a sensation I had to think about what to do.

The hooked fish swam fast towards me, faster than I could retrieve the line, and keep it tight between us. It was as if it knew that by gaining slack it might throw the hook. As frantically I drew line, I stepped back further to counter the trout's advance, and back, and... fell down onto the next level of the overspill. I suppose a two-foot fall, but when you aren't expecting it, and you have your first Black Lake trout on the end of a line, caught on a fly of your own tying, it's not just a comic distance, it's a deep, heartbreaking fall through all eternity, slow-motion, bruised and grazed, S Scotia's varnish itself grazed. But I bounced back immediately. Sprang up those two feet as if I'd never fallen, as if immune to gravity.

Rewind fast, play it backwards and back I am rewinding. I rewound and wound at my reel and raised the tip of my rod, against all slackness, slackness of heart about to befall me, but for the miracle that the fish was still there, bringing unmanly tears to burn my eyes, quickly forced back. So trembling, all goose-bumped, I landed him.

‘A decent fish,' as I am bound to say.

But a decent fish they all agreed, and not least my father, who'd been fishing just across the bay and saw the whole drama unfold, my starring role, disappearing and reappearing like a jack-in-the-box, still only a slip of boy, slow as I was, slow as I have been to mature and find myself, living too long in the dream-element and not long enough, unfitted for the unknown world to come, but quick as lightning for the kill that afternoon.

There was the trout, a decent fish, of course, from high summer. It was no common common speckled fish, but one of those hard-fighting three-quarter pounders. Not just a fish but the key to all others, the key to self-belief. It wasn't that now the trout fell over themselves to be caught by me, but that I knew I had the measure of them. The lake had played with me as the falcon played with the gull. But now I had the measure of the Black Lake and from that moment on, I held my own. As I grew stronger, I could fish harder and cast my line farther, and now I was ready to begin to study the trout itself, and to learn the water intimately as a fisherman.

So it was, and so I toiled and grew, through thick and thin, fair weather and foul, on our pilgrimages to the Black Lake, and passed into a whole other way of being. Our time there then was our ‘Paradiso':

 

It was discipline and fleetness of mind

and footwork in the old metres carried

the day up there, those days bedazzled

by sun and cloud running on the wind.

The poets prolific in all they touched,

quick to hook their lines into the rising

poems, whether at dawn, midday or evening.

They could do nothing wrong. And it seemed

Wales was theirs forever, rain or shine.

No one came up that far but if he did

they knew him without looking twice,

come over the top from nearer heaven

and shared a brew and said, word of god,

they'd find no better day in paradise.

 
It's not that I didn't grow up with my peers, at least not latterly. As to that, as we grow we all maintain a distance, variably, as we discover ourselves and each other. It was that once a week in the season I looked at things from a different perspective. That conditioned me. I took naturally to solitude and inwardness like a duck to water. As if I was inside the words at last, one and the same with meaning. And I could be uncomfortable in company, preferring not my own, but the absence of all company, be it at the stony limits or at home under the wooded hill. The Black Lake time was about a place, a unique place (as all places are unique), and it was about the brown trout. But it was also and no less about being-in-the-world and about the dream and the poem. So it was for my mentors and comrades, John, Ifor and Trefor, each in our way. It helped render me unfit for the world's work, or played to that strength in me that would not, could not, subscribe to the lie in the midst of life.

By the time I was seventeen I discovered a different kind of watershed from those I'd known in the mountains. Quite as suddenly as a fish rises to the fly, I fell smitten by the history master's raven-haired daughter. A year my senior, too, and so apparently beyond attaining, she soon took all my thoughts and dreams. So that, at first, as I fished those latter days with John and Trefor and Ifor my mind ran not on trout but on her alone. I imagined her seeing me, especially when I caught a fish. I imagined her admiring me, wirily resolute in the wilderness, in the mountaineer's stout Dolomites that eventually replaced my father's boots. But was she even aware of my existence? Oh yes, I'd caught her eye, I knew. Though I didn't know what to do about it. Nor did I know but here began my downfall and my ruin, on the road to the unknown world.

That was all after we'd moved to live under the Wooded Hill, to the other corner of the triangle's baseline, and late in the day there.

With the Welsh girl in possession of my heart, another kind of distance grew between me and the Black Lake. And it caused me to renounce my past, for the duration. But any such renunciation is as illusory as ‘in love' itself and the intoxications of such passion. I knew that past so well, so intimately, in every corner, by every rock, in every light, and in all weathers, it was always there to haunt me again, a seduction, a comfort, a mode of being, a deep well of recollections, sights and sounds, a natural history, a place to weather in, to retreat to in the face of adversity and setback, black ink in my inkpot, a ground and grounding, a sheet-anchor, a drogue, forever after: the apex of my triangulation in those years and still so in the map of being, as if it was written in my
DNA
.

 

 
When my father died, it was the first place I found him haunting in my mind's eye. There he went disappearing to the far corner, hard to make out, fishing resolutely all day. He haunted me like a lost love, and also with the vigour of guilt. And there was some guilt in that I had wavered in our common faith and devotion to the common speckled fish, all for a beautiful Welsh girl. (Whom I'd betray. Who'd betray me.) There was guilt in my beholdenness for those nevermore times and the gift they were, but that was a distortion of mourning and not to be borne. It bears repeating: life is all becoming and time is new everyday, however short our future on earth.

And here for a footnote, as to becoming and the world going its way. Not two weeks after my father died, at 85, an impulse at a newstand led me to pick up and browse a copy of
Trout and Salmon
magazine. This isn't something I'm at all in the habit of doing. I don't like the idea of fishing as sport or leisure and all that goes with it, the fishing ‘business'. To me all that is a travesty of what commonly is called nature. For me fishing is no-nonsense spiritual engagement with nature and eternity. But something prompted me, and what did I open it at but a double-paged colour photograph of the Black Lake, from high on the hill, above the track down from Melynllyn, a view right round from the overspill to my favourite northern corner, the perspective and wide-angle ironing out the precipitous nature of the cliffs, the steepness of the shore, but showing the lake as black as I've led you to believe it to be. Scoop some of it up in your hand and be surprised to see it's transparent, not black at all, though the ink in my ink-bottle looks no blacker.

‘Trout where the ravens fly' the article was called. It told of one Gary Lyttle's trek into the Welsh hills, in search of wild brown trout, and declared that ‘Dulyn enjoys a spectacular location'. And here I read how things had changed: the lake had been stocked with char, and with ‘native' trout from Brenig reservoir. The one-pound fish held across Gary Lyttle's outspread hands was clearly one of these stocked fish, not native for a moment. I could have told you that as a boy, except there were no stock fish in the Black Lake then, and never a char, but only true native dark-backed common speckled fish,
brithyll
– monoglot trout as old as Wales –
brithyll du
, you might say. But heartening it was to see the double-spread photograph, and to have the article's author confirm how hard he'd had to toil to reach the lake. That's something time is unlikely to change too much, unless we evolve to sprout wings and to fly. My father had only just died. Was it his spirit prompted me to pick up that magazine? I'm not given to such superstition. But the occasion made me wonder. It was a magazine he regularly bought. The fishing ‘business' didn't deter him.

But haunt me, he did, and does. I fish for trout more now than for many a year since those days in my youth. But not, I am sorry to say, for too many years at Dulyn. Here, as a footnote to my footnote, is a poem my father's death prompted from me. I call it ‘Gone for Good':

 

How many more poems will you haunt,

old man? I know you won't say, but

don't pretend you're not keeping count.

I know you and I know you're not done yet.

As on those endless dour days you'd cast

and cast into the evening and keep casting

while I'd pray the next would be your last

not knowing then that faith is everlasting.

My mother said you just upped and left

but that was ever your way, if you could.

Given half a chance to fish I'd do the same.

There's nothing new except we are bereft

and now we say you've gone for good

which so far hasn't lived up to its name.
 

But he was alive and in his prime when his father died and we inherited the house under the wooded hill,
Tan-yr-Allt
...

Whither, to another part of the wood:
exuent omnes
.

Not all headlands aspire to the condition of islands. But the Great Orme, as the Norse name is, or Gogarth as Welsh prefers – St Tudno's headland – at the end of the Creuddyn Peninsula, was surely once an island. And it might become one again, with a little help from climate change in due time. If that happens it will fulfil an apocalyptic fantasy of my youth, in the name of small islands and their beauty. What still attaches and detains the Orme lies below sea-level but not yet below the sea.

In my day the Creuddyn isthmus – the name connotes bloodiness, after massacre – was for much of its length a delta of green farmland, with the town huddled and piled up a little at the end of it, taking a foothold where it might on the lower landward terraces of the Orme's head. There, in winter, on the plain, flashes of flooding would surface to blink at the sky. These sudden surfacings, uplifting to heart and eye, most of all on a whistling-cold morning, were haunted by gulls and waders, oyster-catcher, curlew, sandpiper. They were a breath of fresh air and I loved the way they brought a frisson of shoreline landward of the town.

What caught me then and catches me now is the way such manifestations, such upwellings, expose the tenuous nature of our settlement. How easily it might go down, and be as nothing. Such flashes come to life most at dawn and nightfall, spring and winter, with change of light. So in youth and age
tempus fugit
inspires impatience and scorn at human vanity.

If only we could grasp our insignificance and live appropriately. Getting and spending we lay waste our powers. Little we see in Nature that is ours. So runs the text. It's only a matter of time before souls become extinct, as I put it in a strange poem written in 1968 on Inis Mór: the soul is only human after all.

Edge-of-town supermarkets and new housing occupy those open spaces now. The flash-floods are drowned out by Asdaville and shopping ‘parc', tarmac and concrete. The ground remains below sea-level, protected so far by sea-wall-cum-promenade. But there is hope yet, post- apocalypse, to name Ynys Gogarth or Tudno... or Inis Orme, Orme Island, the Isle of Orme, as anyone left alive might choose. Ferryman wanted.

My Scottish grandparents are buried on the Great Orme. They lie in a graveyard – O grave yard – whose cross-eyed northerly aspect squints up the Irish Sea, beyond the Isle of Man, to Galloway, home from home, for my grandpa at least (my granny was born in Govan). An ideal lodging, in the circumstances. Who wouldn't prefer self-draining limestone to dank and wormy clay? I did not go to either funeral. I was deemed too young, even at twelve, my age when grandpa died. It was his death, my granny predeceased him, that brought us seven miles west along the coast to live at Tan-yr-Allt.

The house stood at the eastern boundary of Llandudno, high above the town, ‘under the wooded hill', as so expressively the Welsh name has it. Where do you live? Under the wooded hill.... What a way to think and speak. Hard to think too at this point in my legendary ideal story that only ten years later I'd be living on Inis Mór (too mundanely, the big island), another limestone landscape to praise, living out my dream for real, or unreal, playboy of the western world. So this time under the wooded hill nursed the dream and helped it grow. What was the dream? That our lives are travesties, whatever our dreams. Or are dreams are travesties, whatever our lives? I know what I believe.